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posted by martyb on Saturday May 11 2019, @03:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the s/he dept.

Exclusive: Google releases 53 gender fluid emoji

[As emojis] become more inclusive, each becomes less universal. Jennifer Daniel, designer at Google, thinks about this deep irony at the heart of visual language all the time. She traces it back to the age-old problem with the male bathroom symbol. "That person could be man, woman, anyone," she says. "But they had to add a little detail, that dress, and suddenly that person symbol doesn't mean person anymore; it means man. And that culture means a man-centered culture."

While Daniel can't fix our bathroom signage, as the director of Android emojis, she can fix another problem: The lack of gender-neutral symbols in texting. She can give us the zombies, merpeople, children, weightlifters that are neither male nor female. "We're not calling this the non-binary character, the third gender, or an asexual emoji–and not gender neutral. Gender neutral is what you call pants," says Daniel. "But you can create something that feels more inclusive."

Google is launching 53 updated, gender ambiguous emoji as part of a beta release for Pixel smartphones this week (they'll come to all Android Q phones later this year). Whether Google calls them "non-binary" or not, they have been designed to live between the existing male and female emoji and recognize gender as a spectrum. Given that Google collaborates with many of its rivals on emoji, it's likely that Apple and others will release their takes on genderless emoji later this year.

Daniel sits on the Unicode consortium–the organization that sets core emoji standards, including signifiers like gender and other details, that designers at Apple, Google, and other companies then follow to create their emoji. Last year, she pointed out that there were 64 emoji that, according to Unicode's standards, were never meant to signify gender. In fact, 11 don't have a Unicode-defined signifier for male or female at all–like baby, kiss, fencing person, and snowboarder. As for the remaining 53, they could be male, female, or neither.

Yet Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and, yes, Google, have often assigned genders with their designs for these emoji. It's why every construction worker across major operating systems is, by default, is a man. Unicode's standards dictated a construction "person," but tech companies decided to design them as construction men (and add women as a secondary option).

Related: Unicode Considering 67 New Emoji for 2016
Unicode 9.0 Serves up Bacon Emoji, 71 others, and Six New Scripts
Unicode 10.0's New Emojis
Stink Over Frowning Poo Emoji at the Unicode Consortium
Microsoft Briefly Left Holding the Gun Emoji
Unicode Consortium Adding 230 New Emojis in Emoji 12.0


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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday May 11 2019, @04:19PM (4 children)

    by JNCF (4317) on Saturday May 11 2019, @04:19PM (#842356) Journal

    There's no reason we can't create UTF-64 when the time comes, but that's not to say I'm horribly pleased with the way companies are eating up this character space without discretion and implementing different concepts in the same address space (example: Google gun v.s. Apple water-gun). I feel like their should be a moving window of experimental emoji space that we don't expect to last forever or be consistent across implementations which companies test ideas in (you'd use these for ephemeral communication, not a blog post, and ideally they'd have some sort of background color when selecting them that would indicate to the user how dangerous they are), and multiple competing standards groups that come to consensus on when that window moves and what goes in the clearly defined space. I'm not suggesting laws, just more clearly defined standards we socially expect companies to follow. I also think gender ambiguous emojis are clever; they'd eat up less of the space if we did away with gender specific emojis (which Google isn't). I'd like racially ambiguous emojis too, and for the same reason, though this might be trickier to convey without going into the "I don't care if you're black, white, purple, or green" territory which some people feel is offensive as it trivializes racism as something theoretical. Personally, I'd be happy with an average smudge of human color based on current world-wide demographics with changes over time.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday May 11 2019, @04:54PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday May 11 2019, @04:54PM (#842373) Journal

    There's no reason we can't create UTF-64 when the time comes

    If we meet other alien civilizations, we should put their language glyphs into Unicode (where applicable). 👽

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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @05:13PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @05:13PM (#842380)

      I vote we create UTF-1048576 directly, and just store the MP3 for every word in existence. And for the deaf we put the 3-D printer source file of the object.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @12:16AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @12:16AM (#842527)

        just store the MP3 for every word in existence

        How will you account for every word's 365 genders and 200 sexual orientations and 500 skin colors?

        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday May 14 2019, @05:08PM

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday May 14 2019, @05:08PM (#843485) Journal

          We'll just cryo-freeze you, take out your tiny brain, and hook it up to the Unicode consortium's central mainframe. When a new character is proposed, we'll run it by you and see how hard you trigger, and based on how much butthurt it causes in your preserved thinkmeats, we'll know how many variations to code for.

          ...seriously, WTF is your problem?

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